A Welsh poet and writer.
This collection includes five beautifully illustrated cards, each showcasing a complete poem. Perfect for sharing heartfelt sentiments, these cards come with matching envelopes, making them ideal for any occasion. The combination of art and poetry creates a unique and thoughtful way to connect with loved ones.
Welsh Retrospective is a selection of poems about his native Wales by one of Britain's most popular poets. Dannie Abse's Welsh and Jewish backgrounds have been essential to his writings. Wales and Cardiff, in particular, have haunted his imagination. In this revealing new book book he writes movingly about the Cardiff of his childhood, home of his beloved Bluebirds football team, and also about the small village of Ogmore-by-Sea, location of early holidays and for many years his home in Wales. Selected from the whole of Dannie Abse's writing career, the book includes such well known and well-loved poems as Return to Cardiff and In the Theatre alongside many previously uncollected poems. Some poems draw on Jewish writings, others on Welsh language literature.
2013 marks Dannie Abse's 90th birthday. In his lifetime he has published an astonishing array of work including poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, and autobiography, but it is as a poet that he is best known and loved. In Speak, Old Parrot he returns to themes of loss, love, medicine and its moral implications, the nature of creativity, Jewish folk tradition, and the passing of time. The poems are observant of the outside world as well as the inner life and emotions, but most of all they are a joy to read.
Dannie Abse's rich mixture of Welsh and Jewish backgrounds, and his dual occupations of doctor and author, have led to what is widely regarded as one of the most readable, humorous and poignant autobiographies since the war.
Combining criticism and reviews of the work of a poet whose career spans 60 years, this collection is an essential companion for studying the oeuvre of Dannie Abse. Covering his poetry and prose, this volume also contains specially commissioned essays. This marvelous representative selection of Abse’s own writings, together with criticism of his work, illuminates his achievements for both students and general readers.
WINNER OF THE WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/ACKERLY PRIZE. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.
Widely acclaimed for its warm humour, lyricism and honesty, as well as its accurate evocation of the 30s, this has become a classic. In this autobiographical novel, Abse interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backcloth of the times.
Dannie Abse’s prose anthology draws together essays and autobiographical material spanning a lifetime of writing and practising medicine. We are treated to amusing anecdotes of Abse’s time as a trainee-doctor in wartime Britain, as well as more serious pieces on the Holocaust, Jewishness and the impact literature has had on his medical work. His detailed critical essays on poets ranging from Keats to Plath allow us to engage with his own poetic ‘I believe all poetry should be written out of a personal predicament and should be necessary; that there is an unconscious aspect to poetry, that it’s not all on the surface.’ The resounding voice, like that of his poems, is humorous, compassionate and civilised.
This volume is an anthology of 100 of the finest love poems, including those by Shakespeare, John Donne, Shelley, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Robert Lowell and Tony Curtis.